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Climate Change

"The Atlantic Ocean circulation that carries warmth into the Northern Hemisphere’s high latitudes is slowing down because of climate change, a team of scientists asserted Wednesday, suggesting one of the most feared consequences is already coming to pass."

"The International Maritime Organization is under pressure to finalize long-delayed targets to reduce carbon emissions from the growing shipping industry. But governments remain divided on how aggressive to be in fighting climate change."

"The world is far off course from its goals in cutting greenhouse gas emissions — and research published Tuesday illustrates one of the most striking implications of this.

Namely, it finds that for every five years in the present that we continue to put off strong action on climate change, the ocean could rise an additional eight inches by the year 2300 — a dramatic illustration of just how much decisions in the present will affect distant future generations."

"University of California, Irvine scientists expect the world's fisheries to be, on average, 20 percent less productive in the year 2300, with those in the North Atlantic down nearly 60 percent and those in much of the western Pacific experiencing declines of more than 50 percent."

"Faced with a warming world and few, if any, prospects for dramatic greenhouse gas reductions, some solutions for the climate change problem have focused on deliberately manipulating the Earth’s climate. But from cloud seeding to installing giant mirrors in space, almost all geoengineering schemes ignore perhaps the most dangerous problem the planet faces: ocean acidification."

"Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent based in Colombia, and Josh Haner, a Times photographer, traveled 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile to see how the ocean is erasing the island’s monuments."

"Albright and her colleagues created a huge inflatable container that would rise from the ocean floor and trap 15,000 liters of seawater, “like submerging a bucket underwater and pulling it up,” she says. They then used a ring of air diffusers, much like those that send bubbles into aquarium tanks, to saturate the trapped water with carbon dioxide. This gas acidified the water, which Albright then pumped over a nearby patch of corals, simulating what these creatures will experience 100 years from now."

"The key issue in all of this is the density of water, which drives the cycling of the oceans. Given similar temperatures, salt water is more dense; given similar salt content, cold water will be more dense. These density differences are large enough that if you have a patch of warm, fresh water sitting on top of cold, salty water, the two bodies won't mix very efficiently. The water ends up layered, or stratified."

"If climate change were just a flirtation with disaster—that is, the world acted decisively and cut emissions, and the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide fell tomorrow to preindustrial levels—the planet would respond quickly. Within decades, land temperatures would return to normal. The ocean, however, would bounce back more slowly. Much more slowly."